Museums

Spent the last couple of days visiting family and going to Museums.  The Witte in San Antonio has full size reproductions of dinosaurs as well as a few bones.  One of the full size ones has feathers for a skin! The Texas Memorial Museum in Austin has lots of fossils covering the history of the world from bacteria to present.  The Witte has a very well done exhibit on the way people lived in south texas in the past.  Here is me with a reproduced skeleton of a flying dinosaur,  they have lots of fossils of this type from hand size to the big one (wingspan of 40').  Lots of Texas is made up of limestone and thus they have lots of fossils, compare to Washington state that is mostly Igneous rock and no fossils.  The museum in Austin is in fact built with limestone blocks that have very visible shell fossils all over it.  A very appropriate material for the museum housing dinosaur fossils.  I am also struck by how few fossils sometimes are used to reconstruct an entire animal. 

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Tomorrow we are off to the coast to continue our adventures in boating.  Going to start in Palacios and look at Matagorda Island and San Antonio bay.